Wednesday, November 1, 2017

The Unconventional Heroine in Historical Fiction

This is an edited version of a talk I did
for Bristol Literary Festival 2017 (‘Stories of Strong Women: Unconventional
Heroines’). The original talk also considered the ‘feisty’ heroine, which I’ve
written about in a previous blog - Xena Warrior Princess v Patient Griselda.

Historical
fiction loves unconventional heroines. I take such a heroine to be unconventional
both because she kicks out against the conventions of the time and place in
which she exists, and because she challenges the reader’s image of women in the
past.

She does
work that’s deemed to be masculine: a quick scout around the internet turned up
historical romances about a newspaper reporter, geologist, astronomer, and mathematician.
She refuses to accept the subservient role foisted onto women: she says no to arranged
marriage, she makes her own choices about where she goes and who she sees. Or she
wears men’s clothes, and in donning them she also miraculously assumes
knowledge of male spaces and masculine conventions of which women, middle and
upper class women at least, were usually deliberately kept ignorant. In the
popular history mystery genre, she may be given a traditional female role such
as midwife or lady abbess, yet is able to use that position to apprehend criminals,
despite the fact that she’s operating in an entirely male-dominated legal
system.

Some
writers claim to base their unconventional characters on real, pioneering
women: women who were newspaper
reporters, geologists, astronomers or mathematicians. The trouble is they
sometimes get carried away and set their stories years before these pioneers
were born.

Sometimes,
though, the unconventional heroine is entirely imaginary. Da Vinci’s Disciples by Donna Russo Morin is about an imagined group
of women artists trained by Da Vinci who overcome the obstacles in their way to
practise their art. The Illusionist’s
Apprentice by Kristy Cambron introduces a fictional apprentice to Harry Houdini
who dresses as a man, is wealthy, and works in Vaudeville.

Of
course, these stories sound like a lot of fun, and they are obviously very
popular with readers, precisely because they show women challenging stereotypes.
To that extent, they really function as feminist fantasies.

For me, however, they are problematic in that the
heroine’s unconventionality is defined in purely masculine terms. She may ride,
shoot and dress like a man, run her estates as well as any man, be as learned
as a man...the unconventional heroine is someone who has risen above the constraining
feminine condition of her time simply by being more like a man – because the
assumption is that what men do is vastly superior and important and interesting.

She may dress like a man...Music hall star Vesta Tilly

So while I think there is a place for feminist
fantasies of this sort – because such stories can be exhilarating, inspiring
and just good fun – I also think there’s a risk that they reinforce gender
roles. And by projecting attitudes of the present onto the past we forget that
gender roles are acted out differently at different times. In the 1890s it
was possible to write a biography of the critic John Addington Symonds without
mentioning his homosexuality. You can’t imagine a biographer leaving that out
today.

In fact, this fantasy unconventional heroine in historical fiction has
herself become something of a convention. Yet there are plenty of examples of
women who were able to rise above some of the conventions that sought to hold
them back for us to write about: the women who struggled to get an education,
to train as doctors, to win the vote. I think we are doing those women – any
women – a great injustice if we just depict them as moderns in fancy dress.

Women who struggled to win the vote

Mary Wollstonecraft, one of my heroines, lived a bold, brave life: she
lived with a man she hadn’t married, she had a daughter by him, and she wrote
an impassioned argument in favour of education for women. But she couldn’t shake
off every shackle of her upbringing, so you’ll find that her argument is
decidedly in favour of education for middle class women, for women who were
expected to marry and have children.

And it’s her limitations, the limitations of her time and place, that make
her interesting. Not that she lived in some never-never land where anything
goes. I think historical fiction is ideally placed to demonstrate that the lives
women lived (and live) are already interesting enough. And depicting women in
their own context, trying to understand what they were up against, may bring us
closer to appreciating just how amazing they really were.

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About Me

I live in Bristol and I write historical fiction and non-fiction. In 2006 I completed an MA in English Literature with the Open University, specialising in eighteenth century literature.
My historical novels are set in the eighteenth century. To date they are: To The Fair Land (2012); and the Dan Foster Mystery Series comprising Bloodie Bones (2015), The Fatal Coin (2017) and The Butcher’s Block (2017). Bloodie Bones was a winner of the Historical Novel Society Indie Award 2016 and a semi-finalist for the M M Bennetts Historical Fiction Award 2016.
The Bristol Suffragettes (non-fiction), a history of the suffragette campaign in Bristol and the south west which includes a fold-out map and walk, was published in 2013.